


Sweetened by the thorn

by elo_elo



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dalish Elven Culture and Customs, Dark, Developing Friendships, Dom The Iron Bull (Dragon Age), Dom/sub Undertones, Elven politics, Elvhen politics, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Grief/Mourning, Iron Bull/Lavellan - Freeform, Light BDSM, Love Triangles, MC is not the inquisitor, Past Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Dragon Age: Inquisition - Trespasser DLC, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Slow Burn, Smut, Solavellan Hell, Solavellan helll, also as usual lol, as usual, at least not in the traditional sense, because you know, but later, court intrigue, follows most of the events of the game, from a different perspective, like full on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 15:07:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29455728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: There is more to him than she expects. What with his drawn face, the soft academic cadence of his voice. But perhaps it is just so, the staff he wields so heavy and solid, that he would have a warrior’s body. The soft rounding curves of his muscles, the hard, imposing line of his form. He is slick with sweat now, as though he’s exerted himself. The hearth at his side illuminates him only in pieces. His back, the round of his shoulders, the long incline of his neck. But beyond him, there is another fire, the one that first drew her here, that she had seen from under the space beneath the door, reflectant across the tall pines beyond the wall. It does not move as fire moves, undulating, curling around the air. And it is pale, almost greenish. Unearthly as it falls over his profile.She should go. She has lingered in the rafters too long. But she cannot. It is as if he has her in thrall. He turns, just slightly, just the barest incline of his head. And though his eyes are still cast in shadow, she can feel his gaze upon her.-or-Girl meets boy. Boy is secretly an ancient god with armageddon on the brain.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Solas (Dragon Age), Female Lavellan/Solas
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello  
> I have returned  
> To this ship  
> Because I love pain?  
> But also because I, like you, saw the Dragon Age 4 trailer and well…you know.  
> Honestly, though, I can’t really get this dynamic out of my head and I wanted to explore it in a different way.  
> It’s not the arlathan fic that I floated a while ago but it is Solas. I hope you’ll join me on this return trip to Solavellan hell <3

I had love once in the palm of my hand.  
See the lines there.   
\- John Wieners (1934-2002), from “A Poem For Painters”, in “Selected poems, 1958-1984″ 

“Well, I must not be that good,” she says raising the glass to her lips, “if you know of me at all.” It’s hard to breathe in this room, awash in dark velvets, curtains drawn to shut out Amaranthine’s bustle. The candles have been just lit. She can tell by their new wicks, the glossy shine atop them. As though the room has been prepared just for this. For her. Elhina expects the wine to be poisoned, washes it around for a long time in her mouth before she swallows it, stalling. Unpleasant a feeling to be caught, watched. Like a prey animal, like a small child. She tastes ash in the back of her throat. Not from the candles. She waits. Takes another sip. The room stays righted. She runs her tongue along the backs of her teeth.

“One only really disappears when they are dead.” The woman sat across from her is draped in shadow. A few strands of her hair slip from her hood, catch orange in the light. Too soft a color for a woman so stony as this. The woman’s voice seems to come only as an echo, muffled by the smoke and the muted light. Their accents are the same. That rolling Orlesian lilt Elhina cannot wash out of her mouth no matter how hard she tries. She pokes around her mouth with her tongue, tasting again for poison. As if it would matter now. Foolish. Just as she’s always been. “And sometimes not even then.” Elhina’s eyes dart to the back of the room. Where, silently, two men stand dressed in colors she does not recognize. The Inquisition’s, she imagines, though it seems strange, unnatural even, that an organization she’s so far heard about only in whispers would arrive to the city bearing its own standard, with its own men. These weeks have blurred so finely together. She has missed so much.

Elhina sets her wine down onto the heavy oak table between them. Beyond the veiled window, harbor birds call, ship bells clang. “I’m a thief. That’s all. I cannot imagine what need you would have of me.”

“We don’t have need of a simple thief. And I would rather we dispense with such pretense as that. We are aware of your skills. And we have need of _them_.”

Elhina chips at the table with her nails. She would have been charming once, sly. Today she feels only feral, ragged. “I have no interest in holy wars.”

“We are well aware.” The woman lays an armored hand on the table and for this first time since they arrived to this room, acknowledges the narrow stack of parchment sitting beside her. “We know a great deal about you.” She lays her hand on the parchment and a bodied silence fills the room. So dense even the soldiers at the far end of the room seem to feel it, shifting on their feet. “You’d like to leave Amaranthine.” Slowly, one by one, all the hairs on the back of Elhina’s neck rise. “Perhaps you need to.”

Elhina laughs. A breathless, high pitched laugh that does not sound like her own.  
“How desperate must your Inquisition be to resort to veiled threats.” The woman does not move, eyes cast in shadow, her mouth a thin, still line. “I have no interest in an inquisition.”

That silence rises up again and, gods, it grates. To be surrounded by it, not a single noise to hide behind, to slip away into. “I have heard one of the noble families in the city has taken up the employ of mercenaries.” For the first time, Elhina sees the woman’s eyes. Just a flash as she moves forward to rest her arms upon the table. They are a pale, limp blue dwarfed the whites of them. “A Lord Packton. They say he’s been betrayed. Do you know of him?”

Elhina cannot hide the way she bristles, the way his name feels bodied against her skin. “No.”

“Hmm.”

She squirms in the velvet lined chair. The room narrowing again, the smoke denser. “I’m not sure what you’ve heard.” Elhina reaches for the glass of wine before stopping herself. She is unmoored again. Like she has been for days. Struggling to right herself. Drifting. Tied up in her own knots. She curls her outstretched hand in, nails digging into the skin of her palm. “But might I suggest that instead of chasing thieves around Fereldan you make use of new spies. Perhaps some who will give you information you can actually use.” The woman says nothing. Elhina stands. The two soldiers in the corner do not move. The door seems closer now than it had before. She is light on her feet. As she has always been. “I have no interest in an Inquisition.”

Elhina lingers for just a moment on the steps of the inn. She feels outside herself, stumbling out into the sun like a just born fawn. The city bustles. Loud and bright. Above, the sky churns. The hole in it almost familiar now, bearing none of the shock it had before. For those first days when it appeared, no one could take their eyes from it. A whole sitting standing rapt, faces turned up toward the sky. Night faded only into bare evening, darkness just a memory. That was months ago. No one looks at it anymore except in passing. It’s an old scar in the wide sky, obscured sometimes now by the clouds. No longer growing, creaking, groaning. The talk Elhina hears now in the market is of the war in Orlais. Whispers of a monster on the southerly peaks of the Frostbacks, a great old god, or a late child of the last blight. Rumors that are far away. Further than the hole in the sky had been. Less fearsome. Elhina has no use for rumors like that. But now, standing here on a day that has suddenly become too cold, the sky seems endless. And all things seem possible. War and old gods and new blights. She is shaking with fear. Not from the woman or the visit or the great specter of whatever the Inquisition might mean, it’s arrival here. But from his name, spoken aloud. 

The ambush is not a surprise. Only how soon it has come and then, when the first blow turns to the second, its ferocity. Though that should not be a surprise either. She knew the cost of her decision all those weeks ago. Could feel the echo of this moment now and when they call her a knife ear it is almost a relief. Her fear realized. They can beat it out of her body now, take it from her. And they do. The sounds of the marketplace clearing out and then nothing, just ringing. One of them holds her wrist against the cobblestone and she can feel his fingers tightening even when her eyes fill with blood, her throat. She can feel his fingers even when they are long gone. When it is dark. When she is alone.

She waits for a long time there in the dirt, raising her head only when the quiet has become unbearable to find herself just outside the old Alienage. She laughs, sputtering blood. Fitting that they should leave her here, right at the threshold, there in the shadow of the wall. A taunt. So clearly. And so, she knows it was him. Who else could it be? She can read a warning when one is left for her. Elhina rises slowly, painfully to her feet. It is hardly the worst beating she’s had. Not at the hands of a few mercenaries in a noble’s employ. A child flits away from the gate back into the depth of the alienage, tittering nervously. A chantry sister casts her eyes down as she passes.

Elhina does not have new scars. Because she has learned to be quick, to be quiet. The old ones she does not touch, skimming quickly over when she bathes. But tonight, she finds them again, fingers drawing up the long mark that cuts through her right hip, the nick below her left breast. Her blood is sticky, chilled against her skin, pieces of rock and rubble embedded in the softer parts of her. The numbness inside of her echoes. Below, the din of the inn has begun to mellow. Another inn in another part of town under another name. Running circles around a city that has begun to feel more and more each day like a closing net off the side of a ship. A city that had felt once like wings.

She stares into the shallow basin. The soft sloshing off her bathing these new wounds rhythmic, almost soothing, until the sound of the bird comes loud through her cracked window. Elhina stops, peers into the darkness. It’s a raven. Its gnarled beak pecking a the cloth of the sheers. She opens the window wider, lets the bird come hopping inside. There is a slip of parchment tied to its narrow ankle, bearing the same eye as the standard the flew through the gates of Amaranthine that morning. Below, on the street, a group of young elves come running down the road. Their laughter hushed, the city guards just beyond. Light spills from the taverns across the way. Shouting and music that drifts upward toward the wounded sky. The darkness still halved. A faint, eerie light lingers above the spires at the center of the city, casting a hollow glow across the distant mountains. Somewhere beyond them, a holy war. Or the start of one, at least. Her body aches in time with the creaking of the ships in the harbor. She takes the parchment and spreads it between her fingers. She wonders if they already know she will say yes. If the bird waited all night for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	2. Chapter 2

He’s flirting with her. Brazenly. Openly. So unabashedly that she cannot help but be taken up in it. Because she has seen qunari before – a silent shopkeep back in Amaranthine with scars like pinholes around her lips, a few lingering qunari soldiers in the harbor when their strange, angular ships would dock for supplies – but never one like this. His skin a smooth slate grey that looks almost dappled in the sunlight. Horns jutting out from his head like two weapons, ends pointing sharply up. His armor exposing the hard bulk of his musculature. He calls himself _The_ Iron Bull. And he’s funny and good-natured and charming and he has made the two days they have spent on aching horseback through quiet, snow laden forest something almost bearable. Even with the loud braying and chattering of his men. Night so awash with drink and noise and half-hearted tussles that the trees around their camp become deserted of birds, of all the small animals she had heard such stories about back in the alienage. Elhina supposes it does not matter how loud they are. Not when they’ve come in force, not when they can fight out in the open. A mercenary company whose name she has not yet asked, lest it imply some kind of permanence, lest the question reveal something about her. And he, their leader. She cannot help but watch him, drink him in.

“You seem to know your way around riding.” Bull says, leading his horse now, stretching out his shoulders. The flirting seems to be almost instinctual, directed all around him. Harmless, really, almost playful. But the sun has come out from behind the clouds and its light glints across the shale color of his skin, the hard lines of his muscles. Elhina isn’t sure if she wants him, not really, but she isn’t sure she doesn’t either.

“I’ve never fucked a qunari,” she tells him, gathering up the reins of her horse to lead it just a touch faster. The one eye he still has glitters. He picks up his pace to follow.

It’s a toothless proposition and they both know it. Though the sudden heightened air between them does seem to quicken as they ride make their way through the thinning trees. Elhina wonders what a display that would be. Herself in the role of wanton elf, the Bull a hulking, grunting qunari above her. It would be more fun if there were shems around to scandalize. But there don’t seem to be. Not proper shems anyway. Just those of the grizzled, mercenary variety. Elhina glances again over at Bull, her hands tightening around the leather reins of her mount. He’s shouting over to a slight man at the edge of their party, mouth cracked open into a wicked grin. The slender man reddens from his ears to his jaw and waves the qunari off. And in that moment, the sun so much brighter now, the air almost summer hazy, Elhina almost asks him for true. To stop and make love to her in the trees. A wild thought, no doubt. One born mostly out of the desire to feel something that isn’t the dull ache in her body, the quiet dread as they ride further and further from the city. That old alienage shame comes rising up inside of her. Sharp and quick, vaguely erotic. Just as it has always been. Perhaps she would like a scolding, perhaps she should need one. She eyes Bull again. One side of his mouth crooks up; she watches the hard mass of his bicep flex. He seems perfectly capable of that.

She does not ask him. And when Bull mounts his horse again, a sturdy beast several hands higher than her own, he rides out toward the front of the party, leaving Elhina to her own skittering thoughts. An elven woman rides up near her. The woman’s Dalish markings glint in the sun like a threat. Elhina lays one hand on her mount’s neck. Lets its steady heartbeat pound against her palm, its warmth soft against her fingertips. She feels, if she softens her vision, lets the trees crowd, properly elven. Whatever that means. Elven in the way they always told her she should be. Out here in the woods, free from the thumb of the city. Shalshira would be floored. Pleased probably, in that secret way she sometimes was. _Would have preferred you do this without the band of miscreants though, da’mi._ Elhina flinches, blinks her vision clear. There’s a burnt taste at the back of her mouth, the ash of a memory. Riding toward the new seat of the Chantry. Could anything be more shameful to the woman who reared her?

“Nearly out of the woods.” The elven woman comes riding past her, the comment a passing aside but the loping cadence of her accent feels like a hard slap. So familiar Elhina could trace the shape of each word. A lullaby sung softly over a dirt floor. She shakes it off before the trees part. 

And when they do, Elhina has to lift a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. The pines break out into a wide field, all goldenrod color, not a touch of snow. As though they’ve crossed some border, passed through a gossamer dream. Ripe, red poppies sway in the wind, their color brightening as the thin clouds pass over the sun. The air smells like the threat of rain. The sky is wide and blue and open. Out here, away from the city, the scar in the sky seems to take on new depth. Looks, as Elhina cranes her neck back, like a mirror folded in on itself. Like she might see herself reflected there in it, like she might be able to slip through. The ache in her ribs returns, sharper now. The whole of her body like a bruised, overripe fruit.

Bull finds her again when they stop to water their horses. The valley, flanked on either side by forest, sits at the base of a mountain that in the waning winter mist seems to vanish at its peak. Disappearing into nothing; eaten by the wound in the sky. The thin, shallow river they found snakes almost imperceptibly along craggy rock. Blue, yellow, purple flowers no bigger than the pads of her fingertips sprout from the cracks between them. “You much of a fighter?” He asks, shucking the leather band around his chest to wash it in the cool water. His gaze is cast down into the water but she can tell by the way he’s craned his neck just slightly to the left that he is watching her closely.

Elhina shifts, her bruises aching as she does. The single blade tucked in the hem of her breaches sits cold against her skin. “I hold my own.”

“Those bruises tell another tale.” She winces, he smooths past. “Any idea what they want you for?” He jerks his head vaguely back toward his men. “The Inquisition.”

She’d felt a chill that afternoon in the room above the tavern. Sharp and inside herself. She feels it again, even with the sun beating down on her raw skin. Her ribs ache. “Haven’t the slightest.”

They camp a few long strides from the edge of the forest on the other side of the valley. No snow here but the pines are denser, seem to crowd, loom. She stopped worrying after the first night about Packton’s pursuit. They are too far outside the city now. And he no longer has the coin, nor the will, she imagines, to pursue her. But when she closes her eyes, she can see his well-groomed, noble hands. Trimmed nails, heavy with rings. She can see them around her throat. When she opens her eyes again, they are full of smoke. Bull watches her from across the fire, his massive hands working nimbly some whittling.

She does not see the wolf in her dream, but she can feel the press of his teeth just beyond what she can see. It is an old dream, she knows, as she feels her way blindly through trees, a dream so old it barely feels like her own. Palms pressing against bark, fingers sticky from the ferns she clings to as she stumbles along a narrow path. She’s had this dream before. Back packed like tinned fish in the old house at the Alienage. But it’s darker than she remembers it being. The moon blotted out by the tall reach of the pines. And the wolf is closer. No distant howling. She can feel the matt of his fur against her bare skin. _Di’ana._ The word comes out on the steam of her breath. She does not know what it means but it feels familiar in her mouth. _Vara em._ The wolf nips at her calf; she tears a plant up by the roots, stumbles in the soft earth. _Satha satha satha._

Elhina wakes with another word murky across her tongue. Barely a whisper, far away. She works her teeth over it again, says it out loud to try and remember. _Wormwood._ Elhina frowns. The dying fire casts long shadows over the trees, their leaves like gaping mouths. Her bedroll hard against the earth. Above her, spidered out, wet with dew, a fern. But with the dream still softening her, it looks like wormwood. Like the wormwood that grew on the edges of the alienage, resilient even in the chilled, salted water that came in from the sea to chip away at the stones of the wall. Swampy and root bound. Shalshira’s voice, muted by the pop of the hearth. Her hands curled and worn. Still steady. Weave the tender stems of wormwood through thin branches long as your forearms. _To keep safe from wolves._ No, not wolves. _May the Dread Wolf never hear your steps._ Old stories for fearful old elves. Her calf throbs like a bite.

They break bread together in the morning, the dry crusted heel of it. The sun skims across the horizon, filtering softly through the trees, greening their leaves. He looks bigger here than he had before. A hulking mass. And in the quiet she can see his menace; can almost taste the way he must become fear in flesh in the swift moments before he brings that heavy axe down. Dying embers pop in the morning chill, through the pale smoke he winks at her. “Better finish off these casks. We’ll reach Skyhold before nightfall.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge credit to Fenxshiral for their amazing work with the Elvhen language (and all the credit to my butchery of it to me) 
> 
> Di’ana - stop  
> Vara em - leave me  
> Satha - please 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading <3


End file.
